Are you spitting on the carpet?

The story is told of BJ attending a lecture where a medical doctor was speaking on the subject of “No spit,no consumption.” (for the younger people, consumption is an archaic term for tuberculosis. I remember in 1964, the NYC Subway, on which I rode to chiropractic school every day, still had signs that said “no spitting”!). The M.D. was propagating the medical theory of germs causing disease. BJ questioned as to whether spitting was truly the cause of TB. When the MD assured him that was the way it was passed from person to person, BJ said that meant that Adam must have had TB. The physician admitted he never thought of that but it made a lot of sense to him. BJ said that Adam also must have had every other disease except that there was no one spitting before him. As chiropractors we acknowledge that while not a very nice habit, spitting does not cause TB. We have also given up the notion that vertebral subluxation causes tuberculosis. Science has identified the bacillus but we logically argue that the bacterium is only a contributing factor. Many people with the bacillus present in their body don’t have tuberculosis. We also note that anything that causes the body to work at less than its maximum and vertebral subluxation does just that, is not good. We can stay where we are and let the CCE and medicine control us and limit us to telling people to stop spitting on the carpet. We can go back to where DD started and tell people don’t worry about spitting or consumption, that vertebral subluxation is the cause of all disease and if we keep our spine adjusted nothing can affect us. Or we can leave the diagnosis and treatment of disease up to those who want to treat disease, have the prior right and experience (as poor as that might be) get out of the disease addressing arena and get to doing what we have said makes us unique since the profession began, restoring the relationship between the innate intelligence of the body and the material substance by correcting interference in the nerve system due to vertebral subluxation.